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Prioritizing: An Internship Priority

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6 years ago

This blog was written by Kim Osborne, a spring intern for Intern Queen.

As I wrap up the final week of my virtual internship with Intern Queen, I can’t believe the amount of jobs and projects I’ve been able to complete in just four short months. Looking through my notebook at the amount of steps that went into creating the official Intern Queen “Keep Calm and Intern On” T-shirts (coming soon) or organizing over 100 students blogger to create the best content for Intern Queen readers, I realize that nothing would have been completed on time if it wasn’t for prioritizing. Lauren would always go through prioritizing our daily tasks at the end of our conference calls, but soon I knew what needed to be in done in what timeframe.

Here are three tips that should take priority in your internship and your life:

1. Keep good notes. If you write down everything that you are working on, you will never miss an assignment. At the end of each week, go back over your notes to make sure that you haven’t overlooked anything and move it to the top of your list for next week. Also make sure to note when you need to follow up, so long-term projects don’t fall by the wayside.

2. Don’t stress over the small things. This semester, I dealt with a lot of blogger and press outreach. A tip that Lauren taught me was to look up names of the people you wanted to contact using LinkedIn. This way you wouldn’t be sending a “Hi Internship Coordinator” email. But some contacts just can’t be found so don’t spend 30 minutes trying to find the exact name when you still have 20 other people to look up and email. A good rule of thumb is no more than two minutes on each email.

3. Breakdown larger jobs into easy-to-manage tasks. Using the T-shirt example from my opening, I knew that I wanted one of my personal intern projects to be Intern Queen shirts! I set realistic and measurable objectives like contacting the shirt designers, researching copyright material and organizing the mailing orders. If I hadn’t prioritized each task, the goal of fabulously dressed IQ readers would never have materialized.